Tennessee High School Athlete of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

What is the Tennessee High School Athlete of the Week poll?

The Tennessee High School Athlete of the Week is a free weekly fan-vote recognition programme published at si.com/high-school/tennessee by High School on SI, the prep-sports brand operated by SBLive Sports under the Sports Illustrated (Arena Group) umbrella. Each week of the Tennessee high school sports calendar, the editorial staff nominates standout athletes from across the state based on performance reports, and fans vote to determine that week's winner.

• Coverage spans all three TSSAA sports seasons — fall (football, volleyball, cross country, soccer), winter (basketball, wrestling, swimming), and spring (baseball, softball, track and field, tennis, golf).
• The poll is open to every TSSAA member school — both Division I (public and non-scholarship private) and Division II (scholarship-permitted private academies).
• Voting is completely free; no account, email address, or subscription to Sports Illustrated is needed to cast a vote.
• Automated voting and bot scripts are explicitly prohibited — an athlete found to have benefited from automated votes is disqualified from that week's award.
• The poll closes at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time every Sunday; the winner is announced in the following week's article on the Tennessee section of si.com.
• A Tennessee win appears on one of the most-read sports media sites in the United States — a meaningful credential for athletes seeking college exposure.

Recognition on si.com carries national visibility — a Tennessee Athlete of the Week credit surfaces in any web search of the athlete's name, reaching college coaches who routinely monitor prep sports coverage on major media platforms.

Which Tennessee schools appear on the Athlete of the Week ballot?

Because the poll is statewide, nominees come from all three of Tennessee's grand divisions — East, Middle, and West — and from both TSSAA divisions. The table below lists 13 representative schools that regularly produce nominees, with their current TSSAA classification and home region.

Tennessee's TSSAA structure separates public schools (and non-scholarship private schools) in Division I from scholarship-eligible private academies in Division II. Division I runs six football classes (1A through 6A) based on enrollment, with the 31 largest schools — including Maryville, Oakland, Riverdale, Brentwood, and Bartlett — competing in Class 6A. Division II uses smaller classifications (A, AA, AAA) and has historically produced some of the state's most decorated athletic programmes: Brentwood Academy, MBA, Ensworth, and Lipscomb Academy all hold multiple state titles across sports.

The Athlete of the Week poll does not separate nominees by division or class — a Lipscomb Academy basketball player and a Bartlett football standout appear on the same statewide ballot in the same week, which means the school with the larger and more organised fan network holds a structural advantage in vote totals.

How does Tennessee Athlete of the Week voting work?

The poll is embedded in the Tennessee section of si.com and requires no subscription, no login, and no personal information to use. SBLive's poll widget loads alongside a weekly article listing nominees — each with name, school, and sport — and tallies votes in near-real-time throughout the window. For a broader primer on how statewide online newspaper polls function mechanically, our online-voting guide covers the platform layer in detail.

Unlike many newspaper athlete polls that enforce an hourly or daily vote cap, the SBLive / High School on SI system allows unlimited votes from a single device — the only firm restriction is that automated scripts and bot software are prohibited. An athlete found to have received automated votes is removed from contention for that award cycle.

The practical implication is that total vote counts can be very large in a contested week. A well-coordinated booster network can legitimately produce thousands of votes from real devices without violating any stated rule. This makes the mobilisation question — how many real people can you activate, and how many times will they vote — the decisive variable, rather than the cap arithmetic that governs hourly-restricted polls.

What happens when the poll closes?

Voting locks at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday. The SBLive editorial team tallies final totals and publishes the winner's name in the following week's Tennessee Athlete of the Week poll article — typically posted Monday or Tuesday. The winner's recognition lives permanently on si.com and is indexed by major search engines, making it findable by coaches, journalists, and college admissions staff.

How do you build a winning vote total for a Tennessee nominee?

Because the SBLive / SI platform has no hourly voting cap, the ceiling on organic votes is essentially the size and activity level of the nominee's reachable network multiplied by how many times those people are willing to vote. The leverage points differ from cap-restricted polls — sustained, repeated voting from a committed core group matters more than a single mass-blast.

Two Tennessee-specific patterns consistently move the needle. Nashville-area Division II schools — Brentwood Academy, MBA, Ensworth, Lipscomb — have compact, highly educated alumni communities with strong social networks and high smartphone penetration. A single Instagram post from a current player tagging prominent alumni can drive hundreds of repeat votes within hours. In contrast, large Division I programmes in the Murfreesboro corridor — Oakland, Riverdale — draw from populations of several thousand enrolled students, giving them raw volume when the school administration actively promotes the link through official channels.

The most frequently overlooked tactic in a no-cap poll is simply reminding confirmed supporters to vote again — because there is no cooldown, every person who has already voted once can vote again immediately after seeing a reminder message. A Sunday-morning push to a group that voted Monday can recover a trailing position entirely.

When the organic network has been fully tapped and a gap remains, some campaigns use a paid vote promotion service to reach additional real voters. If you pursue that route, use only a service delivering human votes at a natural pace — our guide to contest voting services explains what to look for. Bot-generated votes in this system directly disqualify the athlete, making service selection the critical risk point.

What are the rules, and can you buy votes for Tennessee Athlete of the Week?

SBLive Sports publishes clear terms for this programme: voting is intended as a fan engagement feature to highlight athletic accomplishment; there is no formal prize for the winner; and the only explicitly prohibited behaviour is automated voting through scripts, macros, or bots. An athlete confirmed to have received automated votes is removed from that week's competition — the athlete, not the fan, bears the consequence.

Two categories of activity are structurally different and should be evaluated separately:

• Bot/script voting — software tools that fire automated requests to the poll widget, often at high speed. These violate the platform's stated terms, are detectable through traffic analysis, and result in athlete disqualification. The risk is real and the consequence is severe for the athlete.
• Paid outreach to real human voters — services that recruit real people to visit the poll page and cast manual votes from their own devices. Structurally this is the same as a booster club email reaching five hundred families who each choose to vote; the mechanism is different, but the vote itself is a genuine human action. Whether this satisfies the spirit of the SBLive terms is a judgement each campaign must make after reading the current official page.

Because there is no cash prize and no formal sweepstakes law framework, the legal risk of any vote-promotion activity in this poll is essentially nil — the practical consequence is entirely reputational (disqualification from that week's recognition). Families and booster clubs should weigh the value of the award against that specific disqualification risk, which attaches only to bot-derived votes. For a fuller treatment of the legal and ethical landscape around online poll promotion, see our buy-votes guide.

Tennessee Athlete of the Week season timeline

The SBLive / SI Tennessee poll tracks the TSSAA sports calendar, which divides the school year into three athletic seasons. Each season has a distinct nominee profile — the sports, schools, and communities most active in the vote shift meaningfully from fall football through winter basketball to spring track. The table below maps the programme to the real Tennessee HS sports schedule.

Within each week the vote window is consistent: polls open after the SBLive editorial team processes weekend results (typically Monday), and voting runs through Sunday 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time — which translates to 2:59 a.m. Eastern on Monday morning for Tennessee fans. The Sunday-night close means any final-day mobilisation push needs to reach supporters by Saturday evening at the latest to allow time for repeat voting on Sunday.

Fall football weeks anchored by East Tennessee programmes — particularly Maryville and Alcoa, two of the state's most successful small-city football cultures — regularly produce the year's highest vote totals in the Tennessee poll. Maryville's fanbase, which supported the Rebels through multiple undefeated state championship runs, is well-documented as among the most organised prep communities in the Southeast.

For other Tennessee statewide recognition contests and voting events, see our Tennessee contest guide hub. For the full catalogue of US prep-sports polls by state, visit the USA contest guide index.